Cold Cases in Worth County, Iowa

Lowell Stumo, a 48-year-old former U.S. Army Sergeant who served in Vietnam, was shot to death with a high-powered rifle sometime on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1997, near his farmhouse southwest of Northwood, Iowa. Stumo’s wife, Marie, said she discovered her husband’s body lying next to his pick-up truck the following morning. The Stumo farm bordered Elk Creek Marsh, a state-owned property where hunting is allowed, and though authorities initially questioned whether the death was a murder or a hunting accident, they eventually classified it as a homicide.

On Wednesday, November 11, 1998, an unnamed family member discovered 81-year-old Mildred Clemenson beaten to death in her rural Kensett, Iowa, mobile home — a home about seven miles west of Kensett and directly attached to the family farmhouse at 3926 Ironwood Ave., where Clemenson’s only daughter, Marcia Patton, lived with her husband Ron and the couple’s two children.

An autopsy indicated the elderly woman had been dead for two days and died from a blow to the head with a blunt object.